


stutter-free

by anthrop



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Short One Shot, teeth where teeth should not be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 08:26:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4780544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was a little girl, Rose thought a crystal was growing inside of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stutter-free

**Author's Note:**

> Fragment of something abandoned and forgotten I found recently and tidied up. No idea where I was going with it now, but I still like what's here. Title comes from Bloc Party's [On](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf7vaSxojAY).

When she was a little girl, Rose thought a crystal was growing inside her head. She could imagine a multifaceted and polished shape, sharp as glass and dusk-dark, warm and pulsing as a living thing. When she was a little girl, Rose thought the pressure in her skull was the first whisper of magic.

Only once did the pressure answer her when she tried to use it. On her thirteenth birthday, dressed in a starry costume robe and waving a plastic wand, she heard something whisper her name and the world _broke_. Her vision went white, and then red, and then black. She was deafened by the roar of a storm-churned ocean, buffeted by hungry waves that sought to pull her down where light could not reach. Yet she was not afraid.

That is the day her cat died.

Rose grew older and more withdrawn, hiding herself in books heavy with words longer than her fingers. She no longer believed in magic. She knew there was no crystal, no pretty bit of rock nestled behind her forehead. She imagined instead a tumor, cancerous and malignant, an accidental hiccup of cells that would reduce her frontal lobe to mush. She imagined the remnants of an unknown twin, cannibalized in the womb and getting revenge the only way it could. She thought of wise Athena springing forth fully grown from mighty Zeus' splintered skull, and then she asked her mother if making a doctor's appointment would be too much trouble.

There wasn't so much as a shadow on the x-rays, but she knew better. Something was there, nestled across the wrinkles of her brain, growing fat on all the words she could no longer bring herself to write down. Her head was growing heavy, and thoughts sloshed around it like water in a jug. She imagined she could hear the splashing of all her stories left unwritten, drowning her mind, smothering her cognitive thinking, blurring her understanding of what was and what could never be. She heard the tapping of rain on window panes even on sunny days, and smelled the rank ocean always.

It was not until the pressure in her head spoke that at last she grew at last afraid.

It told her many things, whispered by no mouth and heard by no ears in the secret darkness behind her eyelids. It told her things that were true, things that would be true, and things that might be true if an action was or was not done. She was yet a curious creature, and put its whispers to the test.

That is the day her mother died.

Rose once believed in magic, and when that failed her she tried to find solace in cold science. She knows better now.

The thing inside Rose Lalonde has teeth, and it has begun to bite.


End file.
